So basically this post turned from a simple post talking about a few dps builds I was thinking about, to a full blown guide into the rogue raid capabilities. I got a little out of hand, but I think it’s a good read
Builds I came up with are what I believe to be the best rogue builds for their own dps, as well as their raids. The guide goes into the builds pretty deeply and most of the specifics are explained. However I didn't explain every single point I placed in a tree because #1 I'm lazy, and #2 you don't need me telling you that +20% crit damage is better than increased stealth movement speed for PvE content.
Melee
Now, the first build is Assassin/Bladedancer/Nightblade
I believe this build will do some pretty insane dps, while bringing a lot of buffs to the table.
The dps side of it is pretty straight forward +20% crit damage, +15% poison damage, back stab ignores 50% armor, ect, ect. Most of the pure dps talents come from the assassin tree, but the nightblade tree offers +15% dmg to finishers and combo point generators as well as hellfire blades(basically a 3rd poison) and the blade dancer tree gives you +5% hit, +20% auto attack damage, and +15% dex. There is also a point in sprint in the bladedancer tree, it's basically a filler point, but I'm sure it will come in handy.
The fun comes from the raid buffs. The first 2 come from the assassin tree.
1. Lethal poison - increases crit by 5% against the enemy for 15 seconds every time it procs, because of how fast your attack will be and poison proccing 24% of the time you only need this on one weapon, allowing you to use leaching poison on the other weapon and helping out the healers a little bit.
2. Expose Weakness - not a huge buff but worth a spot in the rotation, it increases damage by a certain amount on the next 20 attacks against a target.
The next big raid buff comes from the nightblade tree.
3. Melted skin - this causes hellfire blades, which are essentially just a third poison, to cause the target to take an additional 5% damage for 15 seconds, only 1 point is required since 2 points only makes it more often, and that isn't an issue considering how often hellfire blades procs.
and then 2 more big buffs from the bladedancer tree.
4. Combat prep - increases the raids dex by a certain amount lasts 1 hour
5. Dauntless Strike - Increases the crit of the raid by 5% for up to a minute, its a finisher so the minute buff requires 5 combo points.
So overall
+10% crit for the raid
+5% damage
+X amount of dexterity
and whatever expose weakness ends up doing.
The dps rotation is pretty simple. Basically you just puncture whenever its off cool down, then back stab until you have 5x combo points, then it just comes down to your finisher rotation.
For bosses always use:
- Dauntless strike
- Ebon hand
- Impale
- Final Blow
In that order of priority, in other words, whenever the buffs from 1, 2, or 3 need to be refreshed use them first, when all buffs and bleeds are up, use final blow.
Use expose weakness, poison malice, and blade tempo as often as possible.
Also with this build it might be worth it to drop a point in combat efficiency to pick up enduring brew depending on your raids healing situation.
The PURE dps version of this build really only gives you 4% more chance to apply poisons and sacrifices, melted skin and a point in sprint, or combat efficiency, to be honest I don't think its worth it because if the other rogue dies your raid loses its melted skin buff aka 5% damage to the boss. So really if there are 2 rogues of this spec in the raid the only difference is that one uses dauntless strike, and the other one doesn't.
Ranged
The next 3 builds are are very similar variations of the same build. They are for maximum ranged dps and focus on the marksman tree. Also if you look at the builds you will notice I have points in serrated blades, which says that it only applies to melee criticals, but I'm not sure if that means actually close up hand to hand melee, or if that essentially means physical criticals, because this game has a hard time distinguishing between the two. But if serrated blades doesn't work on ranged attack it doesn't effect the build at all, it just means that 3 points are going to be wasted.
One inconvenience of this build is that it only brings one raid buff that I'm sure will get very annoying to use. Lightning fury causes the target to take 10% more damage for 10 seconds, and is on a 10 second cool down. So basically, you have to use it off the cool down and it will probably nerf your dps a a decent amount, but in a raid setting with 10+ other people dpsing it it is absolutely worth it.
And keep in mind that if you want a sprint, you can take pretty easily take 1 point out of either of the other 2 trees and put it into on the double in the marks tree.
The first is marks/assassin/bladedancer, I believe this is the best option out of the 3, in fact I don't really think it will be even that close, but I have my doubts so it will need to be tested.
The second uses the marks/assassin/nightblade but puts more points into assassin because nightblade doesn't need as many as blade dancer does.
The last uses marks/assassin/nightblade and kinda wastes 6 points in marks, but gets you another very useful cool down, and a sprint.
Basically these 3 builds come down to this.
+5% hit, which I'm sure has a cap on it, but with this talent you can focus on other stats.
+15% dex
+20% auto attack damage
Blade tempo +30% physical dmg for 15 seconds every 2 minutes
VS
+15% combo point generator damage
+15% finisher damage
Hellfire blades (20% proc to do X amount of fire damage)
+10% poison damage
+8% chance to apply poison
VS
+15% combo point generator damage
+12% finisher damage (lost 3% because I think its better to get poison malice).
Hellfire Blades
+5 meters range
+sprint
Controlled Fire reduces cost of marks abilitys by 50% for 15 seconds every 2 minutes
This might not sound that great, but used in conjunction with hit and run allows you to spam empowered shot and deadeye shot, with no cooldown, and nocast time, and allowing you to auto attack on the move.
The rotation for all 3 of these is the same.
Empowered shot when its up, followed by hasted shot until you have 5x combo points. Then rapid fire shot when you need the buff, and dead eye the rest of the time, and like I mentioned before, if you are the only marksman in the raid, spam lightning fury. If there are more than one of you i recommend taking turns .
use your cooldowns together, and roll night elf, the racial is too good to be true when you pop it with hit and run =D.
Anyway that's it, I'm sure there are other effective DPS builds, but I'm pretty confident that these will do the job best.
by Pierce
